I think there is something missing here.
This treatise in fact gives me no reason to believe anything
at all.

What is not explored is the relationship between evidence
and belief. Evidence does not on its own lead to belief.

Evidence does not exist on its own.

There has to be
an observer of the evidence.

As soon as this element is
introduced serious logical problems start to occur because
there is no absolute observer

- the observer is part of
the same universe that the evidence is in.

It is easy
to use this to produce all sorts of absurdities.

Observer's interpret evidence. No attention here has
been paid to that interpretation process. The statement
"I believe" is not the same as "it is".

Those who practice science are usually well aware these
days of these limits to their thinking but yet still there is
no overall model that encompasses consciousness and
thus allows us to include the observer.

I think

it is engineers that believe,

not scientists. The
distinction is not made in this treatise and the
issue is muddied.

bogey

Thanks for sharing that. It is an excellent treatise on rational
thinking. Something this world could stand to have a bit more of.

Mike


Xenos the Elder wrote:

Good And Bad Reasons For Believing
Richard Dawkins

Dear Juliet,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is
important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that
we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look
like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like
the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a
smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?

The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means
actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something
is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with
their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The
"evening star" looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a
telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we
call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or
feeling..... ) is called an observation.

Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation
always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody
(except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But
detectives can gather together lots or other observations which may
all point toward a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints
match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it.
It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's
joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can
think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that
they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the
world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a
guess ( called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say
to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so.
This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really
round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same
direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.When
a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't take one look at
you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you
may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I ought
to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests
them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead
hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only
then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child
has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood
tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make
observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much
cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But
now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for
believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for
believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and
"revelation."

First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a
discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited
because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some
had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus,
or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child,
asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what
I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to have no connection
with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and
grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either.
They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims
believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."

Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't
all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite
right and proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out
their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to
make for the moment. I simply want to ask where their beliefs come
from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down
from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed
down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from
almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like
the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down
over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them
seem special. People believe things simply because people have
believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.

The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story
was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original
story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down
over a number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!

Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England,
but this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There
are other branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and
the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish
religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and
there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe
even slightly different things from each other go to war over their
disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty
good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But
actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different
traditions.

Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe
that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die
but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions
disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other
religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they
don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's body
was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on
how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the
Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't
invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it
was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was
made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people
started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed
down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the
more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and
official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I
was the age you are now. But the story was no more true in 1950 than
it was when it was first invented six hundred years after Mary's death.

I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it
in another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons
for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it
because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the
Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and
people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one
branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men
with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are
prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway
country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally
told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven,
what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to
believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be
true! Now, probably some of the things that that pope said in his
life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why,
just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said
any more than you believe everything that other people say. The
present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the
number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as
slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines,
diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence
ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't,
with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of
186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the
speed of light. This looks like "authority." But actually, it is much
better than authority, because the people who wrote the books have
seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the
evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even
the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about
Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.

The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called
"revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that
Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that
it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed
for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became
more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a
feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though
there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling
"revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots
of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing
the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and
you'd probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it
happen?" Now suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is
dead. I have no evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me
that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you,
because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is not a good
reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We
all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out
to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have
opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right?
The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or
hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen
or heard some real evidence that he is dead.

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside,
otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves
me." But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that
somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody
who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence,
and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the
feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to
back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the
voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves
them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely
to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling
that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't
even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside
feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't
trust them.

Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you
ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can
have a "hunch'" about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself,
this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a
good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or
looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside
feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything
until they are supported by evidence.

I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another
way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us.
All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in
the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good
at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish to be good at
surviving in fresh, water, while lobsters are built to be good at
surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too, and we are built
to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other people. Most
of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we buy it
from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We
''swim'' through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to
survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with
other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of
people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.

You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You
each speak the language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own
separate "people sea." Language is passed down by tradition. There is
no other way . In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund.
Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other.
Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at "swimming about
in their people sea," children have to learn the language of their
own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and
this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous
amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional
information just means things that are handed down from grandparents
to parents to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker for
traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out
good and useful traditional information, like the words of a
language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing
in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.

It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children
have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to
believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false,
right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and
based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false,
silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children
believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do?
Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So,
once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is
completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the
first place - it can go on forever.

Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is
a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief
that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are
answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these
beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people
believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them
when they were told to believe them when they were young enough to
believe anything.

Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they
were told different things when they were children. Muslim children
are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up
utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even
within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from
Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers ,
Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly covinced that they are
right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for
exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin
speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the right
language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are
right in their own countries, because different religions claim that
opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern
Ireland but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.

What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do
anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time
somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to
yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know
because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only
believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next
time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them:
"What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you
a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe
a word they say.

Your loving

Daddy

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist; reader in the
Department of Zoology at Oxford University; fellow of New College. He
began his research career in the 1960s as a research student with
Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nico Tinbergen, and ever since then,
his work has largely been concerned with the evolution of behavior.
Since 1976, when his first book, The Selfish Gene, encapsulated both
the substance and the spirit of what is now called the
sociobiological revolution, he has become widely known, both for the
originality of his ideas and for the clarity and elegance with which
he expounds them. A subsequent book, The Extended Phenotype, and a
number of television programs, have extended the notion of the gene
as the unit of selection, and have applied it to biological examples
as various as the relationship between hosts and parasites and the
evolution of cooperation. His following book, The Blind Watchmaker,
is widely read, widely quoted, and one of the truly influential
intellectual works of our time. He is also author of the recently
published River Out of Eden.
http://members.fortunecity.com/templarser/dawkins2.html